In a book dedicated to his grandchildren and “grandchildren everywhere that will inherit their own watersheds,” John E. Ross, winner of the National Outdoor Book Award and author of more than a dozen books exploring the interaction of humans and the natural world, gives us a more or less complete written and pictographic profile of our immediate bioregion in Western North Carolina and East Tennessee with Through the Mountains.
With 60 illustrations that include such visuals and maps as “Ice Age Boulders,” “Archaic Indian Village,” “Devil’s Courthouse,” “Judaculla Rock,” “Southern Highlands Weaver,” “Tobacco Farmer,” “Pigeon River Rafting,” “Drovers Road,” and many others, Ross gives us an amazing visual history of the French Broad watershed and then backs it up with his conversational writing style that is evidence of an impressive amount of personal knowledge and research.
With chapters titled “The Headwaters,” “Eden of the Mountains,” “Morning Greets the Watershed,” “A Land Unsettled,” and “Rivers of Resilience,” we get a closer look and insight into the actual environmental aspects of where we live here in these mountains. Growing up in Knoxville, Tennessee, and “collecting arrowheads and potshards with a friend, before moving to Asheville in 2014,” Ross’s book is an equal combination of nature and culture in a storyline where he tells both with “a valued lens,” to quote author Doug Orr, the former chancellor of Warren Wilson College in Buncombe County.
Right out of the gate, I was reminded of Wilma Dykeman’s classic book The French Broad and its impact on our region. Ross updates Dykeman’s history with new research, and expands the range of our region beyond the confines of merely the French Broad River “in one of the world’s oldest and most heavily visited mountain regions.”
Ross not only pinpoints the natural elegance and beauty of our mountain watershed, but also gives us a parallel storyline chronicling the various abuses of our region by industrialization as well as enslavement, not to mention the Civil War and, more currently, our contemporary crisis related to climate change as evidenced by the recent destruction by Hurricane Helene. We get up close and personal with Ross’s creative account of human habitation in the region early on: “Perhaps the first [visitors] were Indians of the Archaic era who may well have relieved their aches 5,000 years ago with a good soak in Hot Springs and then take the gravel road down the river to see Paint Rock.” The author serves as a kind of tour guide, giving us a chance to virtually hike and river-ride historically through these mountains—going so far as to give us the known origins and migrational history of our fisherman’s favorite: brook trout.
While I loved reading Dykeman’s book and have read many others on this region’s ecology and history, I can’t remember any of these that I’ve enjoyed reading as much as I have John Ross’s narrative, account, study and saga of this place in which we live. It, literally, was a book I couldn’t put down.
With creative interludes like: “Cup your hands together and tilt them toward the floor. Imagine the seam where they meet as a river and the lifelines on your palms as tributaries. If someone slowly poured water into your hands, it would run out over the tips of your little fingers like a tiny waterfall. You have just created your own watershed.”
It’s a page-turner.
Personal asides like this one fill Through the Mountains, which makes the reader feel as if they were in the place Ross is describing, such as Devil’s Courthouse, a place of legend and myth for the Cherokee, and home for the Corn Mother “Selu” near Shining Rock. On the Tennessee side near Gatlinburg is an old grist mill that over the years has changed names and identities to become country music superstar Dolly Parton’s Dollywood.
Despite being the inspired storyteller that he obviously is, Ross is also a realist and he puts his baton down in the last chapter to talk plainly to our spoiled conscience and to put a stronger focus and more logical perspective on the present day. “From the past and the Paleo families in the watershed … 14,000 years ago … is also evidence of troughs and crests of civilization among the mountains and rivers reaching to the present. With uncertainty increasing with each coming year, each coming electoral cycle, each coming decade, each coming generation, we can be certain of little that lies ahead,” he writes.
His view of the next 50 years is based on five vectors: population, climate, energy, transportation and industry. Related to these, either independently or collectively, and how they are managed in the years to come, “they will either produce something of value that generally sustains us or will also threaten our existence.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Thomas Rain Crowe is an internationally-published and recognized author of more than thirty books,including the multi-award winning nonfiction nature memoir Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods and is a longtime resident of Western North Carolina.